Analytically one-dimensional planes and the combinatorial Loewner property

It is a major problem in analysis on metric spaces to understand when a metric space is quasisymmetric to a space with strong analytic structure, a so-called Loewner space. A conjecture of Kleiner, recently disproven by Anttila and the second author, proposes a combinatorial sufficient condition. The counterexamples constructed are all topologically one-dimensional, and the sufficiency of Kleiner's condition remains open for most other examples. A separate question of Kleiner and Schioppa, apparently unrelated to the problem above, asks about the existence of ‘analytically one-dimensional planes’: metric measure spaces quasisymmetric to the Euclidean plane but supporting a one-dimensional analytic structure in the sense of Cheeger. In this paper, we construct an example for which the conclusion of Kleiner's conjecture is not known to hold. We show that either this conclusion fails in our example or there exists an ‘analytically one-dimensional plane’. Thus, our construction either yields a new counterexample to Kleiner's conjecture, different in kind from those of Anttila and the second author, or a resolution to the problem of Kleiner–Schioppa.